Chapter II: New England, 1689-1763 (2)

Upon Rhode Island, Dudley had looked longingly. She would have been brought under his commission but for the exertion of William Penn, then her agent in London. Still, under pretence of consolidating the military strength of the colonies as occasion might require, there was a clause in the commission of Dudley which he construed as giving him command of the Rhode Island militia. Dudley early (September, 1702) went to Newport, and ordered a parade of the militia. Gov. Cranston cited their charter as being against any such assumption of power; and the troops were not paraded.[213] Dudley told the Board of Trade that the colony was “a receptacle of rogues and pirates;” and the people of Rhode Island renewed their fortifications, and sent out their solitary privateer to cruise against French and Spanish. At Dudley’s instigation the Board of Trade (1705) prepared charges of evading the revenue against the colony. Dudley gathered evidence to sustain them, and struggled hard to push the wiry colony to the wall, hoping to crush her charter, and pave the way for a general government for New England, to be the head of which he had not a little ambition. In this Dudley had a confederate in Lord Cornbury, now governor of New York. To him had been similarly given by his commission the control of the Connecticut militia, but a timely prudence saved that colony. Fitz-John Winthrop was now governor,—a second dilution of his race, as Palfrey rather hazardously calls him,—and blameless in purpose always. Dudley’s concert with Cornbury, aimed to crush the charters of both Rhode Island and Connecticut, that each conspirator might get something from the wreck to add to his jurisdiction, utterly failed. In England Sir Henry Ashurst labored to thwart the machinations of Dudley’s friends. In Connecticut Dudley found malcontents who furnished him with allegations respecting the colony’s appropriating unfairly the lands of the Mohegans,[214] and getting a commission appointed to investigate he was made its president. He then proceeded in his own fashion. He omitted to warn Connecticut of the meeting of the court, judged the case peremptorily, and ordered the restitution of the lands. The colony exercised its right of appeal, and prolonging the investigation to 1743 got Dudley’s decision reversed.[215] Gov. Fitz-John Winthrop, of Connecticut, died in Boston while on a visit, November 27, 1707, and was commemorated by Cotton Mather in a funeral sermon, called in his pedantic manner _Winthropi justa_. The vacant chair was now taken by Gurdon Saltonstall, who did his generation great service and little harm. The policy of Connecticut soon felt his active nature.[216] Her frontier towns towards New York were guarded, and Massachusetts found she had an efficient ally in her warfare at the eastward.

Connecticut, which was steadily rising above 20,000 in population in Saltonstall’s time,—though estimates vary,—was growing more rigorous in observance and creed in contrast to the strengthening of liberalism in Massachusetts. Saltonstall favored the Saybrook platform, which put the management of church affairs in a “consociation of ministers,”—a sort of presbytery. Though a general accord in religious views linked her people together, she harbored some strange sectaries, like the Rogerenes of New London, who were allied in some respects with the Seventh Day Baptists of Westerly, just over the Rhode Island line.

This follows the original picture at Yale College by an unknown artist. There is a photograph of it in Kingsley’s _Yale College_, i. 33. There is another engraving in Hollister’s _Connecticut_, ii. 584. There is an engraving by Doolittle noted in the _Catal. Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc._, p. 30.]

The annexed autograph is from a MS. in Harvard College library [5325.23], entitled: _A Memorial offered to the General Assembly of his Majesties Colony of Connecticut hold in Hartford, May y^e 10th, 1716, By Gurdon Saltonstall, Esq., one of the Trustees in Trust of the Mohegan Fields in the Township of New London, for the use of Cesar, Sachem of Mohegan & his Indians, upon the occasion of y^e sd Cesar’s Complaint to y^e sd Assembly of wrong done him and his Indians in and upon the sd Fields._]

It was during Dudley’s time that the emission of paper money had begun to have a portentous aspect. These financial hazards and disputes, as turning people’s thoughts from old issues, had the effect to soften some of the asperities of Dudley’s closing years of service.[217] He ceased to wrangle for a salary, and omitted to reject Elisha Cooke when again returned by the House in 1715 as a member of the council.[218] Massachusetts had grown much more slowly than her neighbors, and five or six thousand of her youth had fallen in the wars. This all meant a great burden upon the survivors, and in this struggle for existence there was no comforting feeling for Dudley that he had helped them in their trials. The puritan class was hardly more content. Sewall’s diary shows the constant tribulation of his representative spirit: sorrowed at one time by the rumor of a play in the council chamber; provoked again on the queen’s birthday at the mocking of his efforts to check the drinking of healths with which it was celebrated on Saturday night; and thankful, as he confessed again, that he heard not the salutes on the Lord’s Day, which were paid to Nicholson when he finally set sail for England.

It was the 15th of September (1714) when news came of the death of Queen Anne. A sloop sent from England with orders was wrecked on Cohasset rocks, and the government was left in ignorance for the time being of the course which had been marked out for it. Dudley’s commission legally expired six months after the sovereign’s demise, if nothing should be done to prolong it. As the time came near, a committee of the council approached him to provide for the entrance of the “Devolution government,” as Sewall termed the executive functions, which then under the charter devolved on the council. Dudley met the issue with characteristic unbending; and some of his appointees knew their places well enough to reject the council’s renewal of their commission, being still satisfied with Dudley’s, as they professed. His son Paul besought the ministers to pray for his father as still the chief executive, and intrigued to prevent the proclamation of the council for a fast being read in the pulpits. In March what purported to be a copy of an order for his reinstatement reached Dudley by way of New York. It was quite sufficient; and with an escort of four troops of horse clattering over Boston neck, he hurried (March 21, 1715) to the town house, where he displayed and proclaimed his new commission. His further lease of power, however, was not a long one.

After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston.]

There were new times at the English court when the German George I. ruled England; when he gave his ugly Killmansegge and Schulenberg places among the English peeresses, and the new Countess of Darlington and Duchess of Kendall simpered in their uncouth English. The Whig lords must now bend their gouty knees, and set forth in poor German or convenient—perhaps inconvenient—Latin what the interests of distant New England required. We may well suspect that this German dullard knew little and cared less when it was explained to him that the opposing factions of the private and public bank in his American province of Massachusetts Bay were each manœuvring for a governor of their stripe. We may well wonder if he was foolish enough to read the address of the ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, or the address even of the General Court, which came to him a little later. His advisers might have rejoiced that Increase Mather, pleading his age, had been excused from becoming the bearer of these messages, or of that of the ministers, at least.[219]

After a likeness owned by the Misses Loring, of Boston. It was at one time in the Mass. Hist. Soc. gallery. (Cf. _Proceedings_, ii. 289, 296, 300, 302.) It has been ascribed to Sir Godfrey Kneller.]

The friends of a private bank carried their point far enough to secure to Col. Elisha Burgess the coveted commission, who, however, was better satisfied with the thousand pounds which the friends of a public bank were willing to pay him, and so he declined the appointment. The same power that paid the money now got the commission issued to Col. Samuel Shute, and the news which reached Boston (April 21, 1715) of Burgess’ appointment was swiftly followed by the tidings of Shute’s ascendency, which meant, it was well known, that Jonathan Belcher, of Cambridge, and Jeremiah Dummer had been successful in their diplomacy in this, as well as in the displacing of Tailer as lieutenant-governor by William Dummer. The latter was Dudley’s son-in-law, and the appointment gilded the pill which the late governor was prepared to swallow.

The good people of Massachusetts had not long got over their thanksgiving for the suppression of the Scottish rebellion when, just about sunset, October 3, 1716, a gun in the harbor told of Shute’s arrival. Two days later, at the town house, he laid his hand on the Bible, “kissing it very industriously,” as Sewall records, and swore to do his duty. On the following Sunday he attended King’s Chapel, and on Thursday he was present at the usual lecture of the Congregationalists, when he heard Cotton Mather preach.[220] He seemed very docile, and doubtless smiled when Mather’s fulsome address to him was paraded in a broadside; very docile, too, when he yielded to Sewall’s entreaty one evening that he would not go to a dancing-master’s ball and scandalize his name. But on November 7 (1716), in his set speech to the legislature, there were signs of trouble. New England had peace on her frontiers, and that was not conducive to quiet in her domestic politics. The conflict came, and Shute was hardly equal to it. The legislature could look to a support nearly unanimous of almost a hundred thousand people in the province, being not much short of a quarter of the entire population of the English colonies; and a people like the New Englanders, who could annually export £300,000 worth of products, were not deficient at least in business courage.

Shute’s instructions as to the demands he should make were not novel. It was the old story of a fixed salary, a house to live in, the command of the Rhode Island militia, the rebuilding of Pemaquid, and the censorship of the press. The governor brought their financial plight to the attention of the House, and they voted more bills of credit. He told them of other things which he and the king expected of them, and they did nothing. So he prorogued them.

It was incumbent on the Crown governor to encourage the production of naval stores, as a means of diverting attention from manufactures, which might injure the market in the colonies for English products. One Bridger had already made himself obnoxious, and been suspected of malfeasance as “surveyor-general of woods,” in Dudley’s time, and it was far from conciliatory to a people who found the Crown’s right to mast-timber burdensome[221] that Bridger appeared in the train of Shute with a new commission. The surveyor was arraigned by the younger Elisha Cooke, who was now succeeding to his father’s leadership, and Shute defending him, a rather lively contention followed, which was not quieted till Dummer, in England, finally got Bridger removed.[222] To one of Shute’s speeches the House made a reply, and Shute threatened he would prevent their printing it.

This follows a red-chalk drawing once owned by the Rev. Wm. Bentley, of Salem, and now in the gallery of the American Antiquarian Society. Cooke was born in Boston in 1678, and died in 1737. His only publication appears to be the following: _Mr. Cook’s just and seasonable vindication, respecting some affairs transacted in the late general assembly at Boston_. [Boston, 1720.] The second impression, corrected. [Boston, 1720.] Sabin, iv. 16,305; Brinley, no. 1,474.]

Its appearance, nevertheless, in the _News-Letter_ established the freedom of the press in Massachusetts.[223] The governor informed the Board of Trade that the province was bound to wrest from him as much of his representative prerogative as it could, and its action certainly seemed sometimes to have no other purpose than to establish precedents which might in some turn of fortune become useful. The House chose the younger Cooke speaker in palpable defiance, and when he was disapproved the members refused to go into another ballot, and the governor prorogued them. When the new House assembled they contented themselves with publishing a protest, and chose another speaker; and then they diminished the “present” which they voted to the governor. It seems clear that the House, in a rather undignified way, revelled in their power, and often went beyond the limits of propriety. The charter required that all acts should be reviewed by the Crown for approval. The House dodged the necessity by passing resolves. Dummer in England knew that such conduct only helped the Board of Trade to push the plan of confederating all the provinces under a governor-general, and intimated as much. The House was in no temper to be criticised by its own agent, and voted to dismiss Dummer. The council in non-concurring saved him; but the House retaliated by dropping his allowance.

The council was not without its troubles. Shute refused to attend its meetings on Christmas. Sewall, ever alert at any chance of spurning the day, “because,” as he chose to think, “the dissenters had come a great way for their liberties,” broadly intimated that the council still could pass its bills on that day, and the governor might take whatever day he chose to sign them. It was certainly not a happy era in Massachusetts. The legislature was not altogether wise or benign, and Shute did nothing to make them so.[224]

The frontiers, for a space, had but a hazardous peace. In August, 1717, Shute had gone to Arrowsick (Georgetown, Me.) to hold a conference with the Indians, and had learned from a letter received there from Sebastian Rasle, the Jesuit missionary at Norridgewock, that any attempt to occupy the lands beyond the Kennebec would lead to war, and as we shall see the war came.[225] Meanwhile, life in Boston was full of change and shadow. Pirates beset the people’s shipping, and when the notorious “Whidaw” was cast away on Cape Cod (1717) they heard with some satisfaction of the hundred dead bodies which were washed ashore from the wreck. There was consequently one less terror for their coasters and for the paltry sloops which were now beginning to venture out for whales from Cape Cod and Nantucket.[226] There was occasion, indeed, to foster and protect that and all industries, for the purchasing power of their paper money was sinking lower and lower, to the disturbance of all trade. When the province sought to make the English manufacturers afford some slight contribution to restoration of prosperity by imposing a duty of one per cent. on their manufactures sent over, the bill was negatived by the king, with threats of loss of their charter if any such device were repeated. In the same spirit Parliament tried to suppress all iron-working in the province;[227] but after much insistence the people were allowed the boon of making their own nails![228] Some Scotch Irish had come over in 1718, and though most of them went to New Hampshire and introduced the potato,[229] enough remained in Boston to teach the art of linen-making. Spinning under this prompting became a popular employment, and Boston appointed a committee to consider the establishment of spinning schools.[230] Perhaps they could spin, if they could not forge; and Boston, with her 12,000 to 15,000 inhabitants to be clothed and fed, needed to do something, if Parliament would permit. Her spirit was not always subdued. In 1721 she instructed her representatives not to be deterred by frown or threat from maintaining their charter privileges. “When you come to grant allowances,” she said, “do not forget the growing difficulties that we at this day labor under, and that poverty is coming upon us as an armed man.”[231] The General Court emphasized its call for frugality by forbidding the extravagant outlay for funerals, which was becoming the fashion.[232] There might have been some scandal at the haberdashery trade which the profuse habits of bestowing upon their parsons gloves and rings made a possible circumstance, to say the least, in more than one minister’s house. But a little innocent truck in the study was not the ministers’ most pressing diversion. Cotton, or rather Doctor Cotton Mather, as he had been called since Glasgow, in 1712, had given him a Doctorate of Divinity, bid for an ally against the liberals.[233] When he and his father assisted in the ordination of the new Baptist minister, Elisha Callender, in 1718; and when Dudley, two years before his death,[234] joined Sewall in open attacks on Leverett and the government of Harvard College, there is little doubt where the sympathy of the Mathers lay.[235] They had hopes, too, that the new Connecticut college would register their edicts, since they could no longer enforce them at Cambridge. Sewall found the Lord’s Supper unsuggestive of charity, when the deacon offered the cup to Madam Winthrop before it was served to him; and we, to-day, had much rather see him riding about the country on his circuit, distributing tracts and sermons to squires and hostlers, and astonishing the children, as he rode into the shire-towns under the escort of the sheriff and his men.

But Yale College, of which so much was hoped by the lingering puritanism, soon surprised them, when Timothy Cutler, its rector, with one of its tutors, and other Connecticut ministers, embraced Episcopacy in 1722. Governor Saltonstall was powerless to prevent it, when at Commencement the story of that defection was told. Cutler went to England, received Episcopal ordination, and came to Boston in 1724 to take charge of one of its English churches.[236]

But before this the care of the body as well as of souls had proved a source of dispute with the ministers. Cotton Mather had read in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Society, to which he was sometimes a contributor himself, of the method which was employed in Turkey of disarming the small-pox of some of its terrors by the process of inoculation.[237] That disease was now raging. While the town was moving the governor to send the “Seahorse,” man-of-war, down to Spectacle Island, because she had the pest among her crew, Mather urged Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to make trial of the Turkish method. The selectmen of Boston and the town meeting opposed it. The House forbade it by bill; but the council hesitated. One of the most active of the physicians of Boston strenuously objected. This was William Douglass, who had been a student of medicine at Leyden and Paris, and who had come to Boston three years before. Other physicians were likewise in opposition. The passions were excited by the controversy; the press was divided; and Mather, who about this time was finding the people “bloody and barbarous,” the town “spiteful,” and the country “poisoned,”[238] had a grenado thrown through his window.[239]

What with the political, financial, theological, and sanitary disturbances of Shute’s time, and the freedom of the press, which the governor had been foolish enough to give them the opportunity of making the most of, the intellectual activity of the people had never before occasioned so great a fecundity of print. The Boston man of the early part of the eighteenth century resorted to the type-setter as readily as he gossiped, and that was easily enough. In 1719 there were five printing-presses running in Boston,[240] and the Exchange was surrounded with booksellers’ shops. The practice of sales of books at auctions had begun in 1717 with the disposing of the library of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton, or at least its catalogue is thought to be the first of such a sale. Thomas Fleet was selling his doggerel ballads, and the boys and girls of New England first knew who Mother Goose was when her nursery tales were published by Fleet in 1719. The _News-Letter_ had been published for fifteen years, but not three hundred were yet sold at an impression. Wm. Brooker, succeeding Campbell as postmaster, felt it necessary to divide the town and give the _News-Letter_ a chance for an altercation, when in 1719 (Dec. 21) he began the _Boston Gazette_. James Franklin had printed this paper for Brooker, but the printing being taken from him he startled the town with the _New England Courant_, which first appeared on Aug. 17, 1721. The new sheet was bold and saucy,—a sort of free lance, to which people were not accustomed; and while it gave little news and had few advertisements, its columns swarmed with what the staid citizens called impertinences. It wildly attacked the new inoculation theory, and elicited a public rebuke for its scandalous conduct from Increase Mather, who was in turn attacked by it.[241]

The Mathers, Elisha Cooke, Sewall, and above all Jeremiah Dummer in his _Defence of the New England Charters_,[242] published not a little of a terse and combative strain, which the student to-day finds needful to read, if he would understand the tides and eddies of the life of the time. Boston was also nourishing some reputable chroniclers of her own story. Thomas Prince, who after his graduation had gone to England, had returned in 1717, yet to live forty years ministering to his people of the Old South, gathering the most considerable of the early collections of books and papers, illustrating in good part the history of New England,[243] and contributing less than we could wish to such stores from his own writing. Dr. William Douglass, as we have seen, had dipped into the controversies of the day, practised his pen in the public journals, not always temperately or with good taste, and thirty years later was to vent so much prejudice in his _Summary of the British Settlements_ that, though the book is suggestive, it is an unsafe guide to the student. Thomas Hutchinson, much the best of our colonial historians, was now a boy of six or seven in the forms of Master Bernard’s grammar school.

* * * * *

This follows an oil painting in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester. There is also of Prince a mezzotint engraving of a painting, of which there is a heliotype in the _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii. 221. A portrait after a painting by John Greenwood is noted in the _Catal. Cabinet, Mass. Hist._ Soc., no. 26. Cf. _Proceedings_, i. 448.]

But war was again imminent. As early as 1709 it had been considered advisable to build a line of defences across Boston neck, and up to 1718 much money had been spent upon it. The peaceful aspect of the affairs at that moment had been an inducement to disband the watch which they had kept there; but in 1721 it had been again set. Gov. Phillips, of Nova Scotia, had been in Boston to talk over the situation at the eastward, for the warnings of Rasle rendered a continuance of quiet doubtful. The younger Castin had been seized and taken to Boston,[244] and bloodshed could hardly be averted; for though peace existed between England and France, there was little question but the encroachments and ravages of the Indians were instigated from Quebec. Sewall tried to arrest the progress of events, and published his _Memorial relating to the Kennebec Indians_,—an argument for persuasion rather than for force. On July 25, 1722, Gov. Shute and his council declared war against the eastern Indians, and a harrowing struggle began.[245] On the 1st of January, 1723, guns at the Castle before sunrise told the town that Shute had sailed for England, and when the people were astir Boston Light was sinking behind him. He went to arraign the colony in person before the Privy Council, and never returned to his government. The conduct of affairs, meanwhile, fell to Dummer, the lieutenant-governor, who made Cotton Mather inexpressibly happy by what the divine called his wise and good administration.

* * * * *

Sketched from an old mezzotint, “W. Burgis del. and fecit,” and inscribed: “To the merchants of Boston this view of the Light House is most humbly presented By their Humble Serv^t, W^m. Burgis.” Its date is probably not far from 1712. See _Boston Record Commissioners’ Reports_, vii. 97.]

New Hampshire had been included in Shute’s commission, but Vaughan, the lieutenant-governor, claimed that during Shute’s stay in Boston his direct authority lapsed, and his lieutenant was the resident executive. The strife and bickering which followed this assumption had been among Shute’s tribulations, which were somewhat mitigated when influence at London secured the displacement of Vaughan by John Wentworth.[246]

The charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut did not order their enactments to be submitted to the royal supervision, a requirement which at one time there was danger would be made,[247] but which was in good part prevented by the ready reasoning of Dummer in his _Defence of the New England Charters_. One act of Rhode Island, published at this time, seemingly invalidates that colony’s claim for unfailing toleration. In the edition of her laws printed in 1715 there is one which disfranchises Romanists. No one is able to find beyond dispute when, in the chaotic mass of her enactments, it became a law. To relieve the pride of her people from any imputation so contrary to the professed purport of all her history, Arnold, the historian of Rhode Island, has labored to show that the wording of the statute was simply the interpretation of a committee; but it was an interpretation that successive editors kept up till after the close of the Revolutionary War.[248]

* * * * *

In Massachusetts matters were not much improved under the rule of Dummer. An issue soon arose. The House insisted that Walton and Moody, commanders at the eastward, should be suspended, and refused supplies till it was done. Dummer claimed that as commander-in-chief he had the responsibility of such a change. He was forced, however, to yield, and appointed Thomas Westbrooke in the place of Walton, who, having obeyed the governor rather than the House, found he must retire without the pay which he had earned.

In England Shute was presenting to the king his memorial against the province.[249] When the House heard of it they appropriated £100 to hire counsel for the defence; but the upper branch gave the resolve a negative. So the House sent an address to the king,[250] in which the council would not join. The House would then despatch a new agent; the council was content with Dummer; a compromise was reached, by which Elisha Cooke was sent to join Dummer. Shute and his opponents were in due time heard before the Privy Council. The aspect of affairs grew threatening. A Boston man, John Colman, wrote home that the charter was in danger.[251] It ended in the sealing of a new explanatory and supplemental charter,[252] in which Shute’s demands were fairly met, in that there was in it an undeniable expression of the right of the governor to reject a speaker, while the House itself was denied the right to adjourn beyond two days. With this new order Col. Samuel Vetch had hopes of succeeding Shute; but the old governor was not displaced. The General Court prudently accepted the new charter, January 15, 1725.

This follows a corresponding likeness in Cotton Mather’s _Parentator_, Boston, 1724 (Harv. Col. lib., 10397.17). Cf. Edmund Calamy’s ed. of _Memoirs of the life of the late Rev. Increase Mather_, London, 1725 (Ibid., 10397.16). Engravings are noted in the _Catal. Cab. MS. Hist. Soc._, p. 35; and of the painted portraits in the same catalogue, no. 23 is of Mather. There is an original painting in the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which is engraved in the _Mem. Hist. of Boston_, i. 587.]

While the provincial charter had been thus in jeopardy, the father of it died. The most conspicuous of New Englanders in his day, though his fame is somewhat overshadowed by his son’s, breathed his last, when Increase Mather died, on August 23, 1723, at the advanced age of eighty-four. When he was buried, a hundred and threescore scholars of Harvard College walked in such a procession as never before attended the burial of a New England divine. In most respects he was the greatest of a race which was born with traits of prowess. His learning was large, far better assimilated than that of the son, and his power over men far happier and more consistent. His industry was enormous; he sometimes worked in his study sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. What Cotton Mather called the “tonitruous cogency” of his pulpit discourse was often alarming to the timid, but not always effective for the mass. The people grew to be disenthralled in large numbers. There was a growing belief that there could be graces even in dogma,—a gospel that never a Mather preached. The rude Bay Psalm Book, and the nasal cadence of the meeting-house, were beginning to pass when the Franklins, in that obnoxious sheet the _Courant_, were printing the hymns of Isaac Watts.

A year after the father died, there was a new election of president of Harvard College. Cotton Mather was as anxious as before. The governing board picked out in succession three Boston ministers, and never seem to have considered Cotton Mather. Their first choice was Joseph Sewall, of the Old South, a son of the Judge; “chosen for his piety,” as the disappointed man sneeringly wrote in his diary. The “miserable” college, when Sewall declined, chose the minister of the Manifesto Church, a direct thrust at Matherism; but no choice was accepted till Benjamin Wadsworth was elected. The college had another conflict when Timothy Cutler, after receiving Episcopal ordination in England, came to Boston, and by virtue of his new position as a Church of England ministrant set up his claim to a seat in the Board of Overseers. He sought in vain. Mather meantime was contriving to fortify himself, and determined to have a synod to organize some resistance to this increasing antagonism. Dummer entertained a petition to that end, but John Checkley, one of Cutler’s friends, ferreted out the scheme, and there followed a sharp rebuke from the lords justices, who pronounced the calling of such a body the prerogative of the crown, and the movement came to naught. This same John Checkley, a polemical churchman, in Boston, who kept a toy shop, united with it the publishing of tracts, in which the prevailing theology was attacked. In 1719 he had reprinted Charles Leslie’s _Short and Easy Method with the Deists_, and later accompanied Cutler and his friends to England. While there he caused another edition of Leslie to be printed (1723), but added to it his own Boston imprint, and what was more important, he appended a _Discourse concerning Episcopacy_, which seems to have been a refashioning of another of Leslie’s treatises, by which Checkley had pointedly demonstrated the schism of all ordination except an Episcopal one. With a stock of this book he came back to Boston, and at the “Sign of the Crown and Blue gate, over against the west end of the town house,” he began to sell them. The magistrates found in some expressions “a false and scandalous libel” on themselves. A trial followed with an appeal, which dragged its slow length along; and in the midst of it Checkley delivered a memorable speech in his own defence. It ended in his being fined fifty pounds.

Checkley left Boston not long after for England; and came back again to settle in Providence, and administer the rites of the church as he believed they should be administered.

During all this wearisome contention in Boston, there is a glimpse of the humaner, and perhaps more godly, spirit in the gathering of men together under the lead of Joseph Marion to effect the insuring of neighbors’ worldly possessions from the chances of fire and the sea. It is not unlikely that this first trial of a system which to-day contributes so much to the sum of our happiness began then to indicate that mutual helpfulness might conduce as much to Christian comfort as keeping eyes alert for “scandalous libels.”

But there was no way yet, except by keeping other eyes alert along a musket barrel, to meet the dangers of the frontier. When the authorities erected (1724) Fort Dummer[253] near a spot where Brattleboro’ now stands, they made the first English settlement in what is to-day Vermont. On the 22d of August (1724), as Sewall records, “the ‘Sheerness’ comes up and Captain Harmon with his Neridgwack scalps, at which there is great shouting and triumph. The Lord help us to rejoice with trembling!” Another diary of the day makes these scalps twenty-eight, one of them Bombazeen’s, and another that of “fryer Railes,”—and this is the shape in which the tidings came to Boston of that quick onset at Norridgewock, when the Jesuit Sebastian Rasle fell among his Indian neophytes, ten days before this.[254]

In May of the next year, Lovewell the borderer made his last fight at Fryeburg in Maine, and the news reached Boston on the 13th of the same month. The ballad of Pigwacket, commemorating that bloody work, passed into the popular memory, and abided there for many a year.[255] In the following November four eastern sagamores came to Boston, and what is known as Dummer’s treaty was signed there on December 16, and the next summer (August 6) it was ratified at Falmouth (Portland). There was to be little disturbance of the peace thus consummated for a score of years to come. The war had borne heavily on Massachusetts. In such money as they had, it had during its four years’ continuance cost £240,000, and when the assembly voted an issue of another £50,000 of bills, Dummer, under royal instructions, withheld his approval. His fidelity cost him his salary for a while, which the House refused to vote until some compromise was reached.

While this quieting of the eastern frontier was in progress, the western settlements of Massachusetts were being pushed across the mountains beyond the Connecticut, and the peopling of Berkshire began at Sheffield in 1725. The leading agents in this movement were Col. Jacob Wendell, of Boston, and Col. Jonathan Stoddard, of Northampton. The occupation proved a barrier against the Dutch of New York, though it was sixteen years before the next settlement was made in the Housatonic valley at Pittsfield.[256]

This follows a red-chalk drawing in the cabinet of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester, which came to it with other portraits by the bequest of the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem (b. Boston, June 22, 1759; d. Salem, December 29, 1819). There is another likeness in the _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii. 227. Cf. Catal. _Cab. Mass. Hist. Soc._, p. 37.]

During the night of the 29th of October, 1727, New England experienced one of the severest earthquakes which she had known. The next morning Cotton Mather made a speech in Boston, and this, with an account of the earthquake’s effects, was published at once as _The Terror of the Lord_, followed shortly by his _Boanerges_, intended to strengthen the impressions of the awful hour in the minds of the people. Haven’s bibliography shows the affluence of the ministerial mind in the face of this event.[257] Sermon after sermon was published, and the press had not ceased issuing the renewed editions of some of them when Cotton Mather died on the 13th of February, 1728, and gave the preachers another fruitful theme. Here was a man whose views of a fitting mundane life were as repulsive as those of Sebastian Rasle, and whose scalp would have aroused Quebec as Rasle’s did Boston. We have grown to judge each by a higher standard than the prejudices and doctrines of their time.[258]

* * * * *

After the departure of Shute, Wentworth continued as lieutenant-governor in the executive chair of New Hampshire. The assembly tried to insist upon a speaker whom he disapproved, but the explanatory charter of Massachusetts came to Wentworth’s support, and he prevailed; and under his lead the province experienced its share of the Indian warfare. Rhode Island remained all the time under Gov. Cranston, who had held the office by election thirty successive years when he died in 1727. Her chief point of contact with her neighbors was her bills of credit, which had sunk so low that they had become little better than a pest to herself and to the neighboring colonies. Connecticut kept her activity and quiet ways within herself. She took no part in the war beyond putting her border towns in a state of defence.

* * * * *

Shute was pursuing his aim in England. He had succeeded in getting from the king an explicit threat, under whose pressure it was thought the Massachusetts assembly would see the advisability of establishing a fixed salary for the royal governor, when George I. died (June 11, 1727), and Shute’s commission was vacated. He slipped into a pension of £600 a year, and died an old man. The news of the king’s death reached Boston in August, and on the 14th George II. was proclaimed with military parade. The ministers beguiled themselves, as usual, preaching many sermons on the death of a good king, and Mather Byles published a poem.

Since 1720 William Burnet, a son of Bishop Burnet, had been governor of New York and New Jersey, whither he had gone to retrieve a fortune lost in stock speculations; and with a numerous family to support, he felt the necessity of it. The new king relieved him of some embarrassment, occasioned by a growing unpopularity in his government, by directing his transfer to the vacant chair of Massachusetts, signing his commission in March. He reached Boston July 13, and as he was escorted to the Bunch of Grapes tavern[259] the people marked his noticeable presence and his suave manners, and might have predicted a calmer sway from him than proved to be in store. He was flattered by his reception, and even ordered the publication of some eulogistic verses, which Mather Byles, the clerical wit of the time, addressed to him.[260]

From a print in Entick’s _Gen. Hist. of the late War_ (2d ed. 1765) vol. ii., frontispiece.]

His instructions were of the sort that the province had got used to, though perhaps they hinted more pointedly of the danger which awaited the charter, if the salary question was not agreeably settled. Burnet’s speech opened the legislative war. The assembly answered it by voting him a larger allowance than was usual,—but still an allowance. The town of Boston had the speech read to it in town meeting, and voted _nemine contradicente_, as we read in the records,[261] in the assembly’s spirit. The House now asked to be prorogued. The governor refused, thinking the £1,000 a month which the sitting cost might bring them to terms. This failing, he resorted to manœuvres which even Chalmers censures. He removed the General Court to Salem, when, in a sort of grim irony, it recorded a resolve to legalize proceedings passed in an unaccustomed place, and consequently unconstitutional, as they claimed. The House now addressed a memorial to the king and refused the governor a copy of it, and, helped by Boston merchants to pay the cost, the representatives despatched Jonathan Belcher to coöperate with Francis Wilks, now the resident agent in London, in obtaining the king’s favorable attention to their plea. This appeal gave the governor a pretext for releasing the legislature for three months,—and perhaps the device of the House had that purpose.

The Board of Trade heard both sides, sustained the governor, and advised the king to lay the facts before Parliament. The House in turn ordered a historical summary of all the proceedings relating to the salary question from the time of Phips to be edited and printed.[262] The governor dissolved the assembly, and took his revenge in withholding his signature to the bill for their own pay. A new election sent to Boston an assembly which was of the same temper. Burnet told them of the danger from the Board of Trade’s advice to the Crown; their own agents wrote to them there was no danger; and so the House continued as bold as ever. The governor directed their reassembling at Cambridge. Here they voted afresh the allowance, which was scorned as before. Meanwhile the governor got some literary recreation, for which his acquirements well fitted him, by printing moral and entertaining papers in the _New England Journal_; and if this did not bring him an income, he managed to eke one out by increasing the rate of clearance fees at the custom house, which all went into his own pockets.

Returning one day from Cambridge to Boston, in August, 1729, he was thrown into the water by the overturning of his carriage. A fever ensued, and he died September 7. The legislature gave him an impressive funeral, and voted £2,000 to his children; and his “character,” by Parson Colman, was circulated in a folio half-sheet.[263]

Dummer, as lieutenant-governor, again took the executive’s chair, and fought over the salary question once more; and the council, as before, steadily refused to join in the payment of the agents of the House.

Jonathan Belcher, lately the agent of the province, was now commissioned governor. He came of a New England stock, and his father had gained a fortune in trade, and had secured some political consideration as a member of the council. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Danforth, one of the ablest of the leading politicians under the old charter. The new governor had graduated at Harvard College; and foreign travel had added ease and attraction, with some of the wiles of the world, to a presentable person. He had been accustomed to dispense his fortune in ways to draw attention and give him consequence. He had thrown out intimations in high quarters in England that the view he once held on the prerogative had undergone a change, and that he knew the turbulent spirits of his native province well enough to manage them. Wilks and Shute had seconded his professions, and his appointment followed. With instructions pitched to a higher demand than ever before, he was sent off to try his skill with an intractable people. Meanwhile Dummer had been superseded by Tailer, a former incumbent of the lieutenant-governorship, chiefly because the naval office he was occupying was wanted for another. Tailer was at the time in New England, and received his commission before Belcher arrived, which was not till August 10, 1730. So amid the terror, from a new invasion of small-pox which had withdrawn the town from the observance of its centenary,[264] and with signs of a new life, as well as a new era, in the relief which the law was giving to the baptists and the quakers from the burden of the parish taxes, and with the stranger element of their population developing a new Irish Presbyterian church under John Moorhead,[265] the people of Boston received their recusant townsman as governor. He made his speech in due time to the General Court. Cato, he told them, went beyond reason in letting his obstinacy lure him to destruction. This reference to the salary contention did not intimidate them; for the House had information from its own agents that the jealousies of the party leaders in England were not likely to let any issue affecting the continuance of the charter be forced upon Parliament. In any event there was a disposition rather to accept parliamentary domination, whatever it might be, than surrender one jot of their principles. With such a disposition the House became stubborn,—politely so. It even voted the governor liberal grants for the services which he had rendered as agent, and he took the gratuities though he had abandoned the grantors. The allowances for his services as governor he could not well accept under such instructions as bound him; and as he needed the pay, his son solicited permission from the home government for the father to receive the usual grants. The request was allowed, and the salary contention came virtually to an end. When Belcher approved a grant of £500 to be placed in the Bank of England to the credit of the province’s agent, he little suspected he was furnishing the means to bring about his own overthrow. His conduct of his office rendered such an overthrow likely. The times, with all failings, had not seen before such flagrant attempts to serve party friends with the spoils of office. The public was so sensitive that even the younger Cooke, accepting a judgeship with some traits of sycophancy, fell in their good opinion.

The House set up a claim to audit all bills for which they granted money, and attaching such a proviso to their grants, such votes successively received the governor’s veto. This denied the public officers their salaries, and occasioned distress that the home government was besought to alleviate. The governor’s position was confirmed, and when the news of it came the House somewhat ludicrously asked him to appoint a day of fasting and prayer, since they were under such a “divine displeasure.” The governor thought the matter more mundane than divine, and refused. So in the autumn of 1733 the House saved its pride one forenoon by passing a bill with the proviso, and in the afternoon satisfied its sense of expediency by reversing the vote. Thus the delegates in their ungraceful way succumbed, as the governor did two years later, respecting the salary question. Each side was humbled, and affairs went smoothly for a while, though the depreciation of the paper in which the governor was paid did not quite fill the measure of his content.[266]

* * * * *

Commercial distress always conduces to emotional disturbance in a community, and the history of the “Great Awakening,” as it was called, is no exception to the rule. This religious revival began to make itself felt in 1734, under an impulse from Jonathan Edwards,[267] and later, under the ministrations of George Whitefield, the wild passion—for it became scarce else—spread through the churches and communities of New England.[268]

Mather Byles, Judge Danforth, and Thomas Prince supported the movement in the _New England Weekly Journal_. Thomas Foxcroft and others, reinforced by a large part of the country ministers, fought the battle in sermon and pamphlet. Benjamin Colman gave the movement a qualified commendation. It found various classes of opponents. Charles Chauncy condemned it for its hot-bed sustenance, its “commotion in the passions,” and its precarious growth.[269] Thomas Fleet, the publisher of children’s books, turned the wit which enlivened his evening _vendu_ at the Heart and Crown, in Cornhill, into the columns of the _Boston Evening Post_, which he had just started. Here he held up Whitefield to ridicule, just as Joseph Green and other wits held up in the same place the pomp of Belcher to public derision. Dr. Douglass[270] reckoned up the thousand pounds sterling that were lost to the families of working people by what he called a misuse of time in attending the midday mass-meetings, to which Whitefield ministered. The passion and fervor swelled, lapsed, returned, dwindled, and died; some counted the wrecks it left, some wondered at its transient impressiveness, and a few occasionally struggled to revive it.[271] Amid all the consternation attending what William Cooper in the election sermon of 1740 called “an empty treasury, a defenceless country and embarrassed trade,” New England managed to raise 1,000 men to send off to join the fleet of Admiral Vernon in the West India waters. Scarce a hundred of them ever returned.[272]

From Popple’s great map, _The British Empire in North America_, 1732. Admiral Preble says in his “Vessels of war built at Portsmouth” (_N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg._, 1868, p. 393) that the “Falkland” was built in 1690, and carried 54 guns; but in some MS. emendations in the copy of his paper in the library of the Mass. Hist. Soc., he says she was probably built between 1694 and 1696. She is considered to be the earliest man-of-war built in the colonies. Within a short time after 1743, three vessels were built in New England for the royal navy,—the “America,” “Boston,” and “Essex.” The same writer, in _The United Service_, January, 1884, p. 98, etc., describing the changes in armament of vessels during the 18th century, defines ships-of-the-line as carrying 50 guns or more on three decks; frigates, 20 to 50 guns on two decks. Sloops-of-war with guns on one deck, and corvettes with guns on the poop and forecastle only, came in later.]

The social life of the chief town of New England passed on, meanwhile, in the shadow of these ominous uncertainties. Jeremy Gridley had as early as 1731 started _The Weekly Rehearsal_, and had given the more scholarly classes this to ponder upon, and that to be entertained with, in columns more purely literary than they had ever known before. If such people welcomed the poems of Isaac Watts,—and one which Watts addressed to Belcher was just now printed in Boston,—they caused Richard Fry, an English printer, freshly come to Boston, to hold a high opinion of their literary taste, because they relieved his shelves of twelve hundred copies of the poems of Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire bard. In 1731 they listened at a Thursday lecture to Colman’s eulogy of Thomas Hollis as a patron of learning; and the neighboring college mourned in him the principal benefactor of this time. Lemercier, the minister of the Huguenots in Boston, published a Church History of Geneva (1732), which was a passing talk. Cox, a bookseller near the town house, got out (1734) a _Bibliotheca Curiosa_, describing his stock,—enormous for the times. Thomas Prince, the minister of the Old South, let his antiquarian zeal bring back the early struggles of the first settlers, when he printed (1731) the homely _Memoirs_ of Roger Clap, of Dorchester, while the century sermons of Foxcroft in Boston (1730), and of Callender in Rhode Island (1739), made the pews slumbrous then, and command big prices to-day. Thomas Prince, moreover, was in travail with his _Chronological History of New England_. He published it in 1736, and the General Court paused to take note of it, and forgot for a moment money schemes and revivals to learn how in the “year 1, first month, 6th day” Adam appeared, to lead the long chronology which Prince felt bound to run down before he got to his proper theme. He had already wearied everybody so much, when he had gone far enough to embrace two or three years only of the New England story, that no one longer encouraged him, and “the leading work of history published in America up to that time” remains a fragment for the antiquaries to regret.[273]

It was in the year 1741 that the Boston Cadets came into existence as the governor’s body-guard. It was earlier, that Thomas Hancock, who had married the daughter of Henchman, the bookseller, by whom he was indoctrinated with the principles of successful trade, built the stone mansion on Beacon Hill which John Hancock, his nephew, later made more famous.[274] It was in this time of commercial distress that, according to Bennett, an observer, the reputation of the ladies of Boston suffered if they went to a dancing-assembly lately set up; but they could drive about with their negro footmen, and “neglect the affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London.” And when the finest lady in Boston, his Excellency’s wife, was buried in 1736, we read of the horses of the hearse covered with broadcloth and escutcheons, and of other parade and adornment, which gave tradespeople something to do and money to earn. Artisans needed then more than now such adventitious help.

This likeness of one of the first captains of the Boston Cadets follows an original by Blackburn in the gallery of the Mass. Hist Society. It was Pollard who received Shirley on his return from Louisbourg. _Mem. Hist. Boston_, ii. 119. He died in 1756. Cf. _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, i. 498, xvi. 390; _Catal. of the Cabinet_, no. 76.]

Not a hatter might make as many hats as he would, because he injured by so much the trade of the English hatter, and Parliament interdicted (1732) any such rivalry. The poor man paid dear for his molasses, because Parliament compelled the merchant to buy it of the English sugar islands, instead of the French colonies in the West Indies.[275] He paid more for his rum, because Parliament protected the English distillers. The merchant smuggled and had no pangs of conscience; and what smuggling could do was very likely shown in the stately mansion that Thomas Hancock built.[276] Can we wonder that the new country did not attract as many settlers as it might; that town rates in Boston increased from £8,600 in 1738 to £11,000 in 1741, and the polls fell off from 3,395 to 2,972; and that Sam. Adams, graduating at Harvard in 1740, took for his Commencement part the inquiry, “Whether it be lawful to resist the superior magistrates, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?”